Eric Clapton

Tracklisting.

1.Blues Before Sunrise
2.Third Degree
3.Reconsider Baby
4.Hoochie Coochie Man
5.Five Long Years
6.I'm Tore Down
7.How Long Blues
8.Goin' Away Baby
9.Blues Leave Me Alone
10.Sinner's Prayer
11.Motherless Child
12.It Hurts Me Too
13.Someday After A While
14.Standin' Round Crying
15.Driftin'
16.Groaning The Blues

From The Cradle

Review

The question remains: can someone in a pair of boots as new and fresh as the ones Clapton's wearing in the CD booklet's pictures possibly have the blues? Well, maybe. Parts of From The Cradle, Eric Clapton's love letter to the blues, succumb to the problems typical of modern, revisionist blues interpretation: the hokey accents (Clapton oversings on "Five Years" and "Third Degree") and the laid-back groove are substituted for the intensity and spark of the originals. Vocally, Clapton often sounds forced, but when his guitar bites off a chord or snarls into the first notes of a solo, he's in peak electric form. These moments - the solos - show the significance of what Eric Clapton really did, which was take the power and psychic energy of the blues and project it to a new audience. If his version of "Hoochie Coochie Man" sounds close to the original, it's because you can tell that every musician in that studio had listened to the original 50,000 times, and knows every beat, pulse, scream and twang of the song to the point of pure muscle memory. Of course, the argument is good that the world doesn't need any more versions of "It Hurts Me Too," "Hoochie Coochie Man" or any of these songs; but by putting his renditions of them in one place, Clapton has created a primer for blues, based upon his love for the music rather than on some other agenda. The thing to remember is that this is not a VH-1 record; it is not a Phil Collins pop record; it is not a radio format record; coming after the massive commercial success of "Tears In Heaven" and Unplugged, it's not even a career move - it'd be a lot safer to keep writing tender ballads or team up with other `60s veterans in a super-group. This is a blues record, a pretty darn good one, and that's all Eric Clapton's ever really wanted to make.

CMJ New Music Report